Lois Kazakoff — How Andy Grove would create jobs in America

Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO and Silicon Valley tech guru, says what I’ve been waiting for someone to say for years: that unless America focuses on creating jobs, we will lose our perch as a global technology leader. He not only says that, he tells how to create jobs in the current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek.

I think the article will prove to be a game-changer.

There’s a lot of happy talk in the business world about the innovation economy, and the need for well-educated creators to be the big technological thinkers for the 21st century. A kind of, “we’ll think it up and others will build it” view of the world.

But how many people have the education, temperment and talent to be technological entrepreneurs, to engage in “knowledge work”? Three percent of the U.S. population? 10 percent? Probably not enough to keep 300 million Americans working.

For many years, Intel and Hewlett-Packard and Apple and other high tech companies did the high-value work (and reaped the profits) in California but shipped the manufacturing jobs to China, India, Taiwan and Malaysia as they downsized their workforces here.

Grove said this was true of the computer industry and now it’s true of the emerging green industry — everything from solar panels to electric car batteries.

The problem with this model — other than losing all those jobs — is that you’ve shipped the knowhow, the experience and industrial relationships overseas, too. So you’ve diminished employment and given away to another country your ability to evolve your technology.

Grove offers the prescription, and then darkly warns of the consequences of continuing on the path we are following now.

The free traders and anti-tax crusaders will be up in arms at the idea of imposing a tariff on the product of offshore labor. But unless we find a way to put millions of Americans back to work, our government will be taking up arms to quell the rioting jobless, as Grove reminds us has happened before.

Read what Grove has to say, and then let me know what you think.

– Lois Kazakoff is the deputy editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.